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In this week’s TLS

Published: 30 January 2013

S
tudents of ancient Greek theatre have long had assistance that is largely
denied to those who have preferred to study drama in the age of Shakespeare
and Sheridan. Classicists possess painted pots, so much more durable than
wood and paper, on which productions from the birth of drama are recorded in
various and infinitely fascinating ways. Edith Hall argues this week that
her colleagues should shout much more loudly about their good fortune in
this regard, noting too that while Athens was the Hollywood of the fifth
century BC, where every artist seeking immortality had to be, there were
other influential centres in southern Italy and Sicily, described in an
important new book by “a world-class team”, headed by Kathryn Bosher.

American foreign policy makers, if concerned by the classics at all, have
tended to prefer the Athenian historian Thucydides over the comedians of
Syracuse. The best-known Foggy Bottom quoter of Thucydides, former Secretary
of State Colin Powell, liked to choose a line that has not survived in any
of the books known to scholarship. But since his favoured quote was in
praise of restraint as the most admired of military virtues, Secretary
Powell has generally been given the benefit of classical doubt.

Misquotation is a common enough fault, frequently perpetrated in dictionaries
of quotations as well as by those who prefer to trust their own memories.
This week Fred R. Shapiro, a distinguished compiler of quotations himself,
reviews the latest edition of Bartlett’s, still the source most commonly
used and misused by those who like their thoughts sustained by the wisdom of
the past. Alan Taylor examines a new dictionary of Scottish sayings. Some of
these are of a relatively recent coinage although he laments the absence of
“the hair-dryer treatment”, a style of verbal abuse for footballers
associated with the veteran Scots manager of Manchester United, Sir Alex
Ferguson.